There’s the rubble, 
in chalky gray and white, 
when all of us are gone. 

The names of leaders, thinkers, and doers,
and the armies of unseen heroes;  
chemical traces of nature and industry, and 
the infinite thoughts that came and went and 
dissolved into the atmosphere.

Words and sounds and images and structures
that meant something once, something more, 
ages ago, but they all seem so strange now, 
so foreign, distant, and ancient. 

And say this page made it there 
because maybe a building collapsed 
in just the right way, I’d hope for it to be 
taken with more than a grain of salt, 

and wouldn’t want it to say too much, 
not much at all, except maybe to provide 
instructions for turning it into a 
paper airplane.